Ethical Search Engine Marketing

Reports surfacing in forums and newsletters around the Internet clearly demonstrate how certain companies resort to spamming the search engines while seeking better rankings. However, negative impact is likely to be caused (sooner or later) by unethical SEO techniques; for this reason, one should be mindful in dealing only with honest search engine consultants. Rather than focusing such technicalities, we should concentrate on which companies provide proper optimization services, and which companies are centered on making easy money. This is the same in every industry, not just SEM. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a professional SEM Business (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.

Prospective clients are known to sometimes bear an unhealthy stance towards search engine optimization, as result of information they’ve read somewhere else. They’ll approach you and as for something like creating a set of 10 doorway domains pointing their website. They don't want you to touch the actual pages of their site, they just want pages that live on the "fringes" of the site.

As you’re likely familiar with, such technique aims to trick search engines into finding the doorway pages, by linking them as sitemap in the homepage. Since the pages are meant to serve as search engine bait, they provide the user with nothing but a distraction, since he’s required to make additional clicks to get to the real website they’d been looking for. In such a scenario, what should you decide: indulging the customer’s request, or take a stand concerning your favored views of website optimization? After all, you’ll only be creating a few pages per customer request, which is not necessarily an act of corruption. On the other hand, what if there was already plenty of good content in the actual website? It would be much wiser to simply revise and adjust the already existing content to match the right keywords, that to create a pointless roster of doorway domains.

Whenever you’re required to take sides in a similar dilemma, you should always favor your professional integrity. If the customer won’t react to your advice against using obsolete and pointless techniques, you’d best refuse to take the job. Sure, it’d be good money for an easy job, so it may sound like a bad decision for some. I mean, you could probably even create those doorway pages using a Page Generator, and after all...but you’d actually be satisfying the customer’s clear-cut request? Sure, you could reason it would be okay to just take the job. It goes without argument that unless you don’t keep your focus on making an effective search engine optimization, you won’t be much of an SEO professional. Always keep sight on the larger picture. On the long run, your reputation is much more valuable than immediate profit.

If you keep your focus on preserving your expertise, there will be customers who appreciate that. Seriously, the money you lose from declining that type of work will be made up in so many different ways. It worked for me!